


Photographs

by hawkflyer667



Series: Snippets of Fluff in the Lives of Merlin and Arthur Pendragon [16]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Happy, M/M, Modern AU, Photographs, Raw - Freeform, Slightly Sad, TW: Suicide Attempts, learning to love and to live again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 17:35:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1275100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkflyer667/pseuds/hawkflyer667
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin uses photographs to keep a paper-trail of a thousand years of life. Arthur discovers these and attempts to come to terms with the weight of a thousand years that his sorcerer carries at all times. (TW: mentions of suicide attempts)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Photographs

**Author's Note:**

> Mentions of suicide but nothing graphic by any means. An attempt to come to terms with the weight of Merlin's thousand years through Arthur's eyes. A raw piece.

Merlin was fascinated with documenting. After such a long life, Arthur supposed it had something to do with the fear of forgetting, of moving on without some sort of physical manifestation of the life he had lived to that point. He certainly had a lot to remember, even if not much of day-to-day life was worth keeping in the forefront of memory.

His method of documenting his timeline was simple: photographs. The camera was, hands down, Merlin’s favorite invention, even passing by electricity and computers and television and even the telephone. His argument was that they had both lived just fine without those new-fangled contraptions but they never had a way to capture a moment as perfectly as in a photograph.

He’d had one ever since they were invented, purchased one for such a ridiculous amount of money at first that he thought he’d been foolish. But after tinkering and messing with it, after glancing at his first photograph of a perfectly preserved moment in time, he realized that he physically could not go through his life without taking a footage-trail of the rest of it.

The stacks of photo albums were ridiculous—they were one of the few things that travelled with Merlin during his periodic flights from place to place as people started to get suspicious. He wouldn’t bring much else as his overflowing bank account normally helped ease any sort of transition, but the photos would come.

They were also the most personal connection Merlin had to just about anything, and even Arthur’s perusal of them was limited and done only with Merlin nearby, reading or watching TV or just observing Arthur’s reactions. This was understandable, some of the photos were old enough to be museum pieces and while magic held them preserved, they didn’t need dirty fingers poking at them.

The photos showed a span of life Arthur couldn’t quite comprehend—he understood, in theory, the weight of a thousand years had put on Merlin’s shoulders, but the staggering amount of time a thousand years was ended up being a bit unimaginable. There was a time where he would end up telling Merlin point blank that he didn’t understand Merlin’s sufferings, could never quite be able to relate to him in that way. But comfort, respect, and deep love didn’t need instant understanding—just the promise to try.

And flipping through Merlin’s photographs allowed him that attempt at understanding the years of Merlin’s life. Some were happy—actually, despite Merlin’s raggedness when he had first returned, most of the photographs seemed happy. Or at least not taken in a moment of dark despair. Not many were of Merlin himself but that was understandable, as he was most likely the one operating the camera.

They were of various people and various life events that Arthur couldn’t quite put a name to—smiling men laughing, women grinning and waving, a soldier in a uniform looking official and a tad frightened, a young woman who didn’t look more than eighteen captured halfway through blowing a kiss. There were friends, there were obviously arguments, there was life, one thousand years of it, captured on these pages.

Some of the photographs weren’t of people, but rather places—homes, fields, forests, the occasional castle, and various other important and significant pieces of Merlin’s past that if fathomed out and put together, would form the incredibly complex and complicated man that Arthur had taken upon himself to love. 

Not that there was any other option than loving this incredible, and incredibly wounded, man.

As the technology in cameras progressed, so did the quantity of photographs. As soon as it became easier and more common to carry a camera in one’s pocket, the sheer amount of photos seemed to multiply as Merlin became a more and more avid documentarian. Every moment needed to be written down and recorded.

Of course, that also meant video—and video was not always used for good. The introduction into the darker sides of the photographs emerged more with the introduction to an easier type of camera—if Merlin was planning on killing himself, he wouldn’t have spent twenty minutes attempting to set up a shot with his gigantic tripod camera of the 1800s. But with video cameras, small cameras, he could attempt to come to terms with himself through a conversation he could record.

His photos and videos, which before used to be a record of his life, became an escape from it—became a place for him to be able to purge every damning thought in his head and speak to the camera as if it was a physical manifestation of an idea or of an energy. Many, many times his notes captured on camera, teary-eyed and exhausted, were to Arthur—begging, pleading, border-line hysterical. 

Those were what he didn’t want Arthur to find. Those were what Arthur eventually did. 

But those were rare in comparison to the thousands of other photos and videos Merlin had made in supreme quantity. As the portability and quietness of the camera rose, so did the volume of Merlin’s candid photographs. He explained to Arthur that he enjoyed seeing the life captured in some everyday moment in time—the simple pieces of existence that he had so many of and yet couldn’t seem to get enough of. 

There were photos of people Merlin had never spoken to tucked neatly into overflowing albums, all developed. There were countless more on Merlin’s hard-drive of his laptop, waiting for the moment where he’d develop them as well and they’d be added to his collection. It was a compulsion to document—better than a compulsion to bleed, perhaps, and definitely a quality way to distract him from the darker thoughts that lurked in the back of his mind. A preservation of life to keep him from seeking death.

Everything seemed to compile on top of itself when Arthur returned. As soon as he was physically able to do so, Merlin had a camera in his hands and was documenting and recording every bit of the process of assimilating Arthur to culture and every soft moment he could of his own recovery. 

And every single stupid stolen moment of the growth and evolution of their own relationship. Arthur had seen the album Merlin had started, titled simply “Arthur”. Inside were hundreds of photos of himself doing incredibly random things—following the line of his back while he was attempting to cook, curled up in a ball reading, dozing on the couch. Working at his coffee-shop and a few even of him stripping and about to get into the shower.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like Merlin’s constant photographs of him—he understood the compulsion, of course, and he enjoyed the photographs, because in the end, there was going to be no other pure representations of him that outmatched these. Merlin’s photos were of /Arthur/-- not King Arthur, not Politician Arthur, not anything. Just…. Arthur, as he was in each individual moment. Very pure, very unedited, and very raw. 

But he was worried that even subconsciously, Merlin was preparing himself for the time in which he’d lose Arthur again—collecting himself hundreds of albums of their time together in order to ease the pain of Arthur’s next passing. He wasn’t sure what to think of this—he wasn’t immortal like Merlin was, couldn’t avoid the ravages of time like his sorcerer seemed to do so easily. But he refused to leave Merlin alone again with just a few simple photographs to somehow document a life together.

So he started doing his own mission—his iPhone that Merlin had purchased and assisted him in learning how to use made it incredibly simple to start to leave his own paper trail. He snapped photos of Merlin in every various situation he could think of. Even, roguishly, a few during sex. Just because he wanted to keep that bit-lip, blown-pupil look Merlin favored so much, wanted to preserve it forever. If a photograph could capture even a hint of the overflowing love in Merlin’s gaze, he’d keep it forever.

He also snapped photos—soft ones, quiet ones, so not to startle Merlin—of the dark nights. Of Merlin’s fear. These were simple to explain—Arthur wished to memorize the look on Merlin’s face when he was terrified or when he thought he was abandoned and then banish it. He wanted to make sure he’d never see that face again.

And the healing and the love-making were part of what made them /them/-- they were raw, real, painful moments that deserved to be preserved just as much as snuggling on the couch or attempting to make meat loaf. 

Merlin had a compulsion to document so he wouldn’t ever lose all of Arthur.

Arthur had a compulsion to document so he wouldn’t ever lose Merlin to his fears.

Either way, photographs were an integral part of their day to day existence—and neither would have it any other way.


End file.
